An acre of evenly spaced tree stumps? Help needed!!

I had an acre of trees cut to make space for my vegetable garden. The forester left enormous tree stumps and now my veggie garden looks like a hedgehog.
What on earth should I do?

I wonder if you could build planting mounds on top of each stump?  Generally when building a hugelculture much of the labor goes into burying the wood.  Every one of those stumps has a buried amount of wood equal to or greater than the size of the tree they took out.
https://permies.com/f/117/hugelkultur We have a whole forum devoted to this buried wood method of developing deep garden soil.  It won't be exactly the same, but I suspect a lot of the early issues will be the same ones you are working with.

I suspect you may have to supply some extra nitrogen (and there are ways to do this without purchasing fertilizer) or grow nitrogen fixers like beans for a couple of years, but in the long run your soil will benefit from the decaying roots.  

What kind of trees were they?

Pity the stumps weren't left higher. It gives you a lever to help pull them out.

After years of being a fool and hand-digging stumps, i now pull them with a smaller tractor. I put a chain around the stump, attach to the hitch, and give short firm tugs. Often I get a bunch of the larger roots too, which is helpful.

If the stumps are too low for the chain, you have to dig so you can wrap it around underneath.

The other option is to leave some and build squash piles around them. It will take years but they will eventually rot out.

Birch, which is actually quite fast to rot.
Actually, I am reluctant to remove the stumps, they will eventually rot in place. And digging them up will destroy the soil. So... building a row of hügels sounds tempting, but requires looooots of soil. I could use the stumps as corner posts for raised beds, maybe.

Casie Becker wrote:
I suspect you may have to supply some extra nitrogen (and there are ways to do this without purchasing fertilizer) or grow nitrogen fixers like beans for a couple of years, but in the long run your soil will benefit from the decaying roots.  

Thanks, Casie ❤ what would you suggest? I can, of course, sprinkle the place with white clover. My bees would love it.

To me that looks like a massive mushroom garden waiting to happen!

Couple of articles on the topic:
12 Mushrooms that grow on and under birch Trees
Mushrooms on stumps

You'll have to get some spawn and go out there with a drill and inoculate the stumps, but that seems like less hassle/energy/money than either digging them out or doing earthworks with machinery. No point using the sweat of your own brow to remove these things when you can have the mushrooms break them down for you, while simultaneously yielding food and medicine while they're at it.

Kaarina Kreus wrote:Birch, which is actually quite fast to rot.
Actually, I am reluctant to remove the stumps, they will eventually rot in place. And digging them up will destroy the soil. So... building a row of hügels sounds tempting, but requires looooots of soil. I could use the stumps as corner posts for raised beds, maybe.

That's what I would do, leave them be and plant between. The roots might be a problem for planting for the first year or two but they and the stumps, which actually look quite small to me, will be gone soon enough. Is that the brush piled up there by the tree line? If so, it might take two or three years, but I would just let it rot where it is until I could just shovel it up and haul it over to the garden. I'm not sold on the hugel thing anyway, sounds like a lot of work and I expect not that all that necessary in most climates.

If they were black locust stumps you might have an issue, took me five years to be rid of them in a much smaller area.

Mushrooms sounds fantastic, too. Not part of my skill set, though.  As far as nitrogen fixers, I am a gardener on a small scale so there are more expert opinions here.  We have used rabbit droppings both from pets and from the neighbors who raised show rabbits.  If it doesn't gross you out every person naturally produces another good source of nitrogen in their urine.

Lots of people swear by coffee grounds.  My mother (who is the best vegetable gardener I personally know) swears coffee grounds are the best thing for attracting earth worms and encouraging them to breed. Worm viagra apparently.

Mostly I just grow a lot of beans and always leave my wild legumes to grow.  I figure the wild legumes in particular are evolved to work well with my local biology to extract nitrogen from the air.

I suspect a lot of the other gardening practices that work well here wouldn't be a good choice for you. Hopefully these ideas are universal enough to work in your climate, too.

https://balconygardenweb.com/tree-stump-ideas/

I'd check out the rental cost of a riding stump grinder. Don't forget to take out any obvious large roots. Alternatively pay someone with a large riding stump grinder to get rid of them. Possibly the outfit that cut the trees.

I ended up ordering peat. The soil was lousy, so it will improve things and also raised the level so that the stumps were swallowed 😄

Kaarina, that is a nice-looking garden.  My suggestion would be lots of wood chips on the rest of the area.

Read up on the benefits of mushrooms on the wood chips and the stumps.

https://permies.com/t/120/120453/Great-Wood-Chips#1286458

https://permies.com/t/168282/Opening-garden-area-cover-crop#1322254

In the fall get as many leaves a you might be able to find.

Best wishes for a successful garden.

I got rid of a big old tree stump in my backyard by piling grass clippings on top of it for 2 years. It wasn't quite as tall as these, but you'd never know where it was.   It's all grass now.

Those stumps will rot in peace 😄. I just did not want them to stick out. But that was taken care of by the one feet of peat and biochar I heaped on them.
I sowed clover everywhere around the bushes, as I thought there must be mycorrizae in the soil as it was a forest.